{"id":4958,"date":"2020-01-18T19:20:20","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T19:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4958"},"modified":"2020-01-18T22:46:11","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T22:46:11","slug":"the-complete-moira-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4958","title":{"rendered":"The Complete Moira: Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Three posts into the series, we finally reach Moira’s first published appearance! (For part 1, see here<\/a>; for part 2, see here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #96 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Sam Grainger<\/a> (“Night of the Demon”, December 1975). <\/strong>And here we are. Moira shows up at the X-Men’s Mansion, responding to the invitation from Professor X (which we saw her receive in Classic X-Men<\/em> #2). This is the point where she gets introduced to the X-Men, who at this point consist of Cyclops, Banshee, Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Later retcons will establish that Moira has met Cyclops and Wolverine already, but neither of them remember it. Sean is immediately taken with Moira, kicking off their romantic subplot which will later settle into a long-term status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moira and Charles both tell the X-Men that she has been hired as the new housekeeper, to look after the house and the X-Men while he’s away. At that point, the demon Kierrok attacks, and Moira promptly gets a machine gun from the armoury to fight it – though Banshee actually bundles her to safety before she has the chance to use it, and the X-Men defeat Kierrok without her. This story is reprinted in Classic X-Men<\/em> #4<\/strong>, which adds a page of Moira and Charles having a private conversation where they reminisce about their past relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

So, a few points to note here. Chris Claremont seems to tinker with his ideas for Moira after the character is already up and running. The obvious question, with hindsight, is why on earth Moira pretends to be a housekeeper when she first appears. It’s not even an especially good pretence, since Storm immediately asks why on earth the Professor is revealing the X-Men’s secrets to a housekeeper – so he has to make clear that he knows and trusts her. Plus, Moira is a Nobel prize winning scientist, and she’s using her real name. Now granted, fair enough, it’s 1977 – the X-Men can’t Google her, and certainly can’t be expected to recognise the names of every Nobel prize winner. But you’d think Moira would at least bother with a pseudonym.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The closest we ever really get to an explanation for the housekeeper pretence is that Muir Isle is so sensitive that even the X-Men aren’t supposed to know about it – a plot thread that makes it as far as Muir Isle’s first appearance before being quietly dropped. As we’ll see, Moira is actually here to help Charles with the nightmares that he’s experiencing at the moment. (Those are due to Lilandra Neramani trying to make psychic contact with him from the Shi’ar Empire – a plotline that will sort itself out without Moira doing anything.) The idea seems to be that Charles is hoping Moira can help out with this unobtrusively and then go home without having to tell the X-Men very much. This sort of ultra-secrecy actually fits better with the Hickman retcon than with the way things transpired originally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #106 by Chris Claremont, Bill Mantlo, Bob Brown & Tom Sutton<\/a> (“Dark Shroud of the Past”, August 1977).<\/strong> This is a fill-in issue told in flashback, set shortly after Moira’s arrival. It has a brief scene of Moira helping Charles with his nightmares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #97 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Sam Grainger<\/a> (“My Brother, My Enemy!”, February 1976).<\/strong> The first published scene of Moira helping Charles with his nightmares. It establishes them as a former couple, but it also shows Charles being very apologetic for something that happened in the past. That plotline is repeatedly mentioned in Moira’s early issues, but gets completely dropped when the circumstances of their break-up are revealed a few years down the line. Again, it seems to be an idea that was started and swiftly revised out. These days, it can probably be taken as a reference to the events of Deadly Genesis<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #98 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Sam Grainger<\/a> (“Merry Christmas, X-Men…”, April 1976).<\/strong> Moira joins the X-Men and some of their supporting cast on a Christmas visit to New York. She and Sean soon wander off on what seems to be their first date. Soon after that, the Sentinels attack the X-Men and kidnap Banshee, Wolverine and Jean; Moira helps plan their rescue, but aside from that, she doesn’t do much else in terms of the main plot – because at this point, she’s a slow-burning background subplot. The added scenes from the reprint in Classic X-Men<\/em> #6 <\/strong>give her a little bit more to do, but nothing terribly important. Moira also has a cameo in the X-Men story in Marvel Holiday Special 1991<\/em><\/strong> (which leads directly into this story) and shows up in Marvels Epilogue<\/em><\/strong> (which retells this story), but neither of them adds much as far as she is concerned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The X-Men’s battle with the Sentinels plays out in issue #99 and #100, with no Moira involvement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #101 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum & Frank Chiaramonte<\/a> (“Like a Phoenix, From the Ashes!”, October 1976).<\/strong> Jean Grey has become Phoenix, and is in hospital recuperating from the experience. (Per later retcons, Jean has actually been replaced by the cosmic Phoenix, while the real Jean is in suspended animation underwater – but that’s years down the line.) Moira duly shows up at the hospital with the other X-Men. More waiting room scenes can be found in the Classic X-Men<\/em> #9 <\/strong>back-up strip, and in the added pages in Classic X-Men<\/em> #10-11<\/strong> (which reprint the Moira-free X-Men <\/em>#102-103). Aside from keeping the nightmare subplot ticking over, Moira’s contribution to these stories is basically to hang around and look worried along with everyone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #104 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Sam Grainger<\/a> (“The Gentleman’s Name is Magneto”, April 1977).<\/strong> Now this is more important. Worried that she hasn’t heard from Jamie Madrox in a while, and fearing “an accident” at Muir Isle, Moira completely abandons the housekeeper schtick and asks the X-Men to investigate. Most of the team are coming from Ireland (where they’ve just had a thrilling adventure with some leprechauns), but Moira and Cyclops fly directly from New York to join them. It turns out that Magneto has been restored to adulthood and escaped. The inexperienced new X-Men team are completely outmatched by Magneto and wind up staging a tactical retreat, taking Moira and Jamie with them. Magneto, having proved his point, simply leaves the island a little later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most significantly, this is where we learn about the Muir Isle Mutant Research Centre. Cyclops is understandably angry that he hasn’t been told about it before. As presented here, despite the name, it’s actually a prison complex, designed to cage the most dangerous mutants in existence (though the only inmates actually identified are Unus, Dragonfly and “Mutant X”, which later turns out to be Moira’s son Proteus). Moira tells Cyclops outright that she hopes to “cure” their hatred for humanity, and she appears to mean doing it through science – essentially the same plot that rears its head again in 1991. Moira also says that this is her life’s work, begun when she and Charles were students and a couple. This story is also the first mention of Moira being a professor at Edinburgh University, though she can’t have spent much time there if she was at Muir Isle, and she seems to have given it up when she went to help Charles with his nightmares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The obvious question is: why is Muir Isle so secret that even the X-Men ideally wouldn’t have known about it? Claremont seems to drop the idea, but as far as we can tell from this story, Muir Isle seems to be some sort of illegal prison which is experimenting on the inmates. Basically, early Muir Isle is presented as a very dodgy place indeed. Claremont seems to decide that he doesn’t really like this take, and it rapidly gets revised into a straightforward scientific research facility, with Moira as something of a public figure. The idea of Muir Isle as a prison won’t really come to the fore again until we get to Excalibur<\/em>. Again, Hickman’s retcon arguably helps make sense of some of this by giving Moira something else that she and Charles might ideally be trying to keep secret from the team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moira doesn’t say in this story that she got as far as actually altering Magneto’s personality, and the idea doesn’t come up again until 1991. Given Magneto’s behaviour when he gets restored to normal, there’s little evidence of the plan working, but maybe Moira just assumes that even an altered Magneto is justifiably angry about his imprisonment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For whatever reason, Moira seems surprisingly relaxed about getting back to Muir Isle to sort the place out after this incident (particularly given that her son is there), and won’t return until issue #110. In the meantime, though, Moira goes back to tagging along with the X-Men…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iron Fist<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #15 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Dan Green<\/a> (“Enter, the X-Men”, September 1977). <\/strong>Claremont engages in a little cross-promotion between his two titles, as the X-Men drop by to visit Jean Grey and Misty Knight, and Wolverine starts a fight with Iron Fist. This issue has a very<\/em> brief scene of Moira going on another date with Sean, in which she tells him that she is unsure whether she wants to “get involved” further, given her past relationship with Charles. That angle never gets developed in X-Men<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next few issues of X-Men <\/em>bring the nightmare storyline to a head, as Lilandra debuts and the X-Men fight the Imperial Guard – all without Moira playing any part, despite it being the reason she joined the cast in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #109 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin<\/a> (“Home are the Heroes!”, February 1978).<\/strong> The X-Men and Moira finally return to the Mansion, now accompanied by Phoenix, Lilandra, and Jean’s parents. Moira allows Alex Summers (Havok) and Lorna Dane (Polaris) to join her on Muir Isle, thus starting to establish the wider supporting cast who’ll be based there for years to come. By this point, Moira and Sean are unequivocally presented as a couple. This is the issue where Weapon Alpha makes his first attempt to recover Wolverine for Canada; Moira gets knocked out in the opening seconds of the fight and plays no further part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #110 by Chris Claremont & Tony deZuniga<\/a><\/strong> (“The ‘X’-Sanction!”, April 1978).<\/strong> The whole nightmare storyline is resolved, so Moira decides to return home to Muir Isle. (You’d figure she’d have a bit more urgency about getting back to Proteus, but seemingly not.) Moira and Sean are considering settling down together, but he stays with the X-Men for now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the issue where Warhawk traps the X-Men in their own Danger Room. Moira’s contribution to the plot is to be the gullible one who lets Warhawk into the building. Warhawk has metal skin and you might have thought his plan would be to pose as Colossus. Astoundingly, his actual plan is to claim that he\u2019s come to fix the telephone, and Moira believes him. It\u2019s not her finest hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moira, Jamie, Alex and Lorna are all living on Muir Isle together by the time of Marvel Team-Up <\/em>vol 1 #69 (another Claremont story, in which Spider-Man and Havok team up against the Living Pharaoh). Moira isn’t in that issue, because she’s visiting Edinburgh for the weekend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #119 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin<\/a> (“‘Twas the Night Before Christmas…”, May 1979). <\/strong>After a year’s absence, the Muir Islanders return, to start the build towards the Proteus storyline. They appear in a subplot where they meet up with Phoenix in Edinburgh, planning to spent Christmas in the city before travelling up to Muir Island for Hogmanay. It’s going to take them four issues to get there, so it’s a good job the book is now on a monthly schedule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Classic X-Men<\/a><\/em> #26 by Chris Claremont, Kieron Dwyer & Terry Austin<\/a> (October 1988).<\/strong> The bonus pages in this reprint of X-Men<\/em> #120 add a subplot where Jean and the Muir Islanders are hanging around at Cape Wrath waiting for their boat to Stornoway. (This is a mad way of getting from Edinburgh to Stornoway, but it’s probably Claremont’s attempt to square the conflicting references in his own stories. Maybe Jean just really, really wanted to see the most northwesterly point on mainland Scotland.) Moira and Jean talk about how Jean can hold on to her humanity after becoming Phoenix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #122 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne & Terry Austin<\/a> (June 1979).<\/strong> The Muir Islanders finally set sail from Stornoway to Muir Island. Moira is now mainly worrying about whether Phoenix can control her power and – in what will become her recurring role – Moira would like to run some tests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #125-128 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin<\/a> (September to December 1979).<\/strong> And so we reach the first full-on Moira MacTaggert story, the Proteus arc. After a week of running tests on Phoenix, the Muir Islanders belatedly notice that Proteus has escaped from his cell by jumping to another body (intruder Angus MacWhirter) and fleeing to the mainland. Well spotted, Moira. Excellent parenting there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Islanders summon the X-Men for help. Moira explains that Proteus is her son Kevin. He has two fundamental weaknesses: his constant need for new host bodies, and metal. The X-Men and Moira set out in pursuit of Proteus, and while the X-Men try to deal with matters in a conventionally heroic way, Moira just tries to shoot Proteus dead with a specially-prepared snipe rifle. She does <\/em>have a thought balloon where she says that she loves him, but there’s a distinct sense that Moira’s been mentally prepared for this for quite some time, and long since wrote him off as a lost cause. And the X-Men do end up killing Proteus in the end, so this is probably intended to read as if Moira is both (a) very hardcore and (b) ahead of the X-Men in terms of the seriousness of the situation, rather than (c) incredibly cold towards her son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moira pursues Proteus to Edinburgh, where he’s planning to possess his father Joe MacTaggert. Moira meets Joe at his home and they argue about Joe’s refusal to give her a divorce. That isn’t how Scots divorce law worked even in 1979, but let’s assume it’s different in the Marvel Universe. (In the real world, even if she didn\u2019t want to rely on Joe\u2019s behaviour, she would have been entitled to a divorce by this point simply on the grounds of over five years\u2019 separation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moira tells Joe about Kevin, having never previously disclosed Kevin’s existence to him. Predictably, this leads to another argument, which Moira briefly considers killing Joe herself, and then leaves. Proteus arrives, kills Joe, and takes his body, at which point he takes on Joe’s hatred for Moira and starts going after her<\/em>. The X-Men arrive to help and Sean in particular is surprised to learn that Moira is married, something else that she hadn’t mentioned to him before either. (Early Moira is very, very secretive – despite the fact that Joe talks as though his marriage to the famous scientist is public knowledge.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proteus torments Moira for a bit, but the X-Men kill him. Moira mourns the death of Joe and Kevin, but is also relieved to be free of them, so that she can start a new life with Sean. We’ll see in several future stories that Moira’s feelings about Proteus appear to be very conflicted; sometimes the emphasis is on the loss of her child, but there will also be a focus on Moira getting a second chance to either parent a child (ie, Rahne) or solve the puzzle of an out of control mutant (ie, Legion). The net effect is to treat Proteus as less a character, and more a challenge that Moira failed to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, this story clears Moira’s old family off the board, leaving the way clear for her to start a new life with Sean. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Proteus arc also claims that Moira is not a mutant and doesn’t register on Cerebro, but we have to take it that that’s an aspect of her Hickman-era powers. It’s hardly infallible – it can’t pick up Proteus either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Men<\/a><\/em> vol 1 #129 by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin<\/a> (“God Spare the Child…”, January 1980).<\/strong> This is usually classed as the first part of the Dark Phoenix Saga, but it opens with a brief scene of the Muir Islanders waving goodbye to the X-Men. Sean, who lost his powers a while ago, finally decides to quit the team and stay behind with Moira.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One last story to complete this chapter of Moira’s history:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Classic X-Men<\/a><\/em> #36, back-up, by Fabian Nicieza, Mark Bright & Joe Rubinstein<\/a> (“Outside In”, August 1989).<\/strong> Moira is still mourning Joe and Kevin, who have symbolic (but empty) graves on Muir Isle. Kevin’s original body is still in Moira’s lab and she toys with bringing him back from the dead. The mechanics of this are impenetrable technobabble, but Moira appears to be saying that Proteus’s mind is somehow linked to his DNA code, that if a new Proteus body was cloned then the original <\/em>Proteus’s mind would somehow be drawn to the body. Needless to say, this issue is extremely <\/em>Hickman-friendly because it asserts that Proteus’s powers can, in some incomprehensible way, restore an original soul to a copied body – which is basically what Proteus is doing on Krakoa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story also has Moira hoping that this time round Kevin might turn out better (which, unfortunately, it tries to tie in with the circumstances of his original conception). At any rate, Sean persuades her to leave the past behind her and she symbolically destroys Proteus’s original body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this idea isn’t forgotten quite yet. Even though Moira doesn’t actually bring Proteus back, she does<\/em> keep a record of his DNA, as revealed in Excalibur<\/em> vol 1 #73 (which specifically refers back to this back-up strip). So Moira is very much keeping her options open with Kevin – something that also fits rather nicely with his eventual role in the Five. (Assuming that’s really him, by the way. For some reason, in the annotations of History of the Marvel Universe<\/em> #6, the Five’s Proteus is described as “presumably Kevin MacTaggert”.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next time: Wolfsbane. And Legion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three posts into the series, we finally reach Moira’s first published appearance! (For part 1, see here; for part 2, see here.) X-Men vol 1 #96 by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Sam Grainger (“Night of the Demon”, December 1975). And here we are. Moira shows up at the X-Men’s Mansion, responding to the invitation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moira","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4958"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5040,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions\/5040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}